VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 and VMware vFabric Application Director 5.0, featuring new and enhanced capabilities for simplifying and automating the management of clouds and applications.

Both new releases are included in the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, a comprehensive solution that integrates VMware’s leading virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU.

“In the cloud era, customers must think holistically about how they manage their multi-cloud, multi-platform and multi-vendor resources,” said Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware. “With the VMware vCloud Suite, VMware brings together what customers need to build and manage a cloud infrastructure as well as new and existing applications by automating infrastructure operations to help IT evolve into a broker of services to the business.”

VMware Cloud Management solutions help deliver the software-defined datacenter by simplifying and automating management while empowering IT to govern services across multiple, heterogeneous clouds.

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 applies patented analytics to integrated performance, capacity and configuration management for cloud infrastructure. Enhancements to VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 include new compliance dashboards, customizable group-based views and application-level monitoring through integration with VMware vFabric Hyperic.

In addition, VMware now includes the performance management capabilities of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite ( as a separate download) with all editions of VMware vSphere.

VMware vFabric Application Director 5.0 accelerates the deployment of multi-tier applications to any cloud through easy-to-create application blueprints featuring standardized, pre-approved OS and middleware components.

This release supports the deployment of applications across multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures, including Amazon EC2.

VMware vFabric Application Director 5.0 also includes expanded support for popular packaged applications, enhancements to simplify ongoing application maintenance and support for auto-scaling of applications to meet changing business needs.

In addition, VMware cloud service provider partners Bluelock, iLand, NTT America and Savvis are announcing their intent to deliver new cloud application provisioning and maintenance services based on VMware vFabric Application Director.
Read service provider partner comments on VMware vFabric Application Director.

To help customers more effectively govern the provisioning of IT services across multiple, heterogeneous clouds, the VMware vCloud Suite will also include VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1 and VMware vCloud Connector 2.0. These products are expected to become generally available in Q4 2012.

VMware also announced the launch of the VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace, which offers vFabric Application Director 5.0 customers access to a broad range of solutions that will help them speed deployments of integrated multi-tier applications.

The marketplace features 100-plus downloadable application blueprints, reference architectures, logical templates containing operating systems, middleware services and application components for custom or packaged applications. These solutions were developed by over 30 independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs) and content providers as well as VMware.